8 ms·
The Rise of the Bullshittery
- d_silin 5mo agoI think at least one approach that can work is de-globalization of social media into smaller, reputation/trust-ranked social networks. Discord is pretty good in this regard.
- rolph 5mo agothat sounds like making friends.
- d_silin 5mo agoIt is!
- bluefirebrand 5mo agoIn order to make friends you kind of need to have spaces where you can meet people and trust them enough to make connections In person is obviously the safest for this. For online friendships I feel the places to meet people you can trust aren't AI or Scammers has shrunk a ton
- nomel 5mo agoA reasonable approach is the one that was used in real life: friends of friends can be invited to the space for compatibility screening.
- bluefirebrand 5mo agoYeah of course It makes it very, very hard to start from zero though. Like starting over in a new city
- fragmede 5mo agoShared hobbies and interests connect people, and you can use that to leverage into friendships.
- dexterlagan 5mo agoIf you have suggestions for good Discord servers, please share. The bullshittery is coming out of my ears. I don't quite know where to turn to anymore. There's HN. Reddit is getting a bit crazy, all other social media is a pass for me.
- d_silin 5mo agoWhat topics are you interested in - I have about a dozen subscribed to. Gaming? Webcomics? Fusion power? Space exploration?
- beastman82 5mo agoI simply cannot click such a domain name
- dan_sbl 5mo agoThis is an Internationalized domain name (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalized_domain_name) - the actual domain shows up in browsers as マリウス.com but HN unfortunately doesn't decode or show it that way.
- lbrito 5mo agoI was befuddled too, thought it was an Elon Musk offspring's name or something. Turns out it is a Japanese character.
- NooneAtAll3 5mo agosimply means you have never left your english-language bubble :)
- lbrito 5mo agoHa, I'm ESL :D
- incognito124 5mo agoThe author has a post on that, btw https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/never-click-on-a-link-that-looks-like-that/ https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/never-click-on-a-link-that-looks-l...
- dmitrygr 5mo ago> bullshitter is not the same as the liar, because the liar at least respects the truth enough to try to hide it, but the bullshitter does not care whether what they are saying is true or false thus, by definition, all LLMs are bullshitters
- bigfishrunning 5mo agoI don't know about that. When you're prompting some LLM, the response you get is a statistically likely valid response to the prompt. Whether it contains any truth or facts or information at all is besides the point; the LLM has done its job of predicting something that is statistically likely to be the answer. The fact that people assign any weight to that information is the mistake.
- dmitrygr 5mo ago> Whether it contains any truth or facts or information at all is besides the point The definition of bullshit in the original article was precisely this: no care given to whether there is truth in what is said.
- ForceBru 5mo agoRelevant research paper: Hicks, M.T., Humphries, J. & Slater, J. ChatGPT is bullshit. Ethics Inf Technol 26, 38 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-024-09775-5
- ragall 5mo agoVery apt parallel between LinkedIn and late night infomercials.
- zelias 5mo agoloving the overlay you get when you open it in a tab and then tab away
- echelon 5mo agoThat was brilliant. Some of the ones I spotted: - FTX Cryptocurrency - Infowars - YouTube: Linus goes into a real girl's bedroom (lmao, what is this supposed to be?) - YouTube: MrBeast en Espanol - Netflix: Fifty Shades of Grey - ChatGPT: Online Debate Argument Suggestions (haha - I've never done that...) - Hacker News: The Internet Used to be Fun - Google: Zuckerberg Nudes - Official Church of Scientology
- stordoff 5mo ago> YouTube: Linus goes into a real girl's bedroom (lmao, what is this supposed to be?) LTT (Linus Tech Tips, a YouTube channel) have used it as a real title before. "Linus goes into a real girl's bedroom - Intel Extreme Tech Upgrade" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkCX8d8WSOg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkCX8d8WSOg
- NwtnsMthd 5mo agoI'm ashamed to admit, I had too many tabs open to notice :|
- languagehacker 5mo agoThe bullshittery is the thing that will not survive enshittification. I keep telling people that all the tokens we're blowing are going to explode in cost as soon as these companies run out of other people's money. To me, this means being laser-focused on your core competencies and only "farming out" stuff to AI that you would offload to a vendor. We're all familiar with the level of risk there, and the kind of encapsulation you need to swap something out if a vendor fails you.
- dmitrygr 5mo ago>The person next to you, who is willing to fake the demo and declare victory on LinkedIn even before the launch, is going to look more successful than you. This is not new, sadly. At least in USA schools, cheating is quite prevalent, as is faking disability to unfairly get more time on tests (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/01/elite-university-student-accommodation/684946/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/01/elite-universit...), so anyone being honest is at a disadvantage.
- mjewkes 5mo ago>an awful lot of modern professional life consists of producing artifacts whose primary audience is other people producing artifacts. Slide decks for slide decks, strategy documents about strategy documents This is because thinking, communication, and collaboration are extremely valuable.
- robot-wrangler 5mo agoYeah, but there's a point here. Are you comfortable with financial derivatives? Derivatives of derivatives? Futures of futures at the 4th, 5th or 50th order? The point being that if you go too far from the substance of things then you've lost the plot. Engineers, especially SWEs, have lots of aphorisms to discourage exactly this and try to put it into professional doctrine and culture. (YAGNI, KISS, secondary-systems syndrome, etc) Most people in management, finance, politics etc won't ever see it as bad unless they actually receive bad feedback. But bad feedback never comes if the incentive structures are broken (that's the point of TFA)
- lokimedes 5mo agoI have a feeling this goes waaaay back, but was covered by claims of authority, in a time where merit and authority were intertwined. My pet peeve is that management is a transferable skill that supersedes industry expertise. It is such a convenient lie that offers MBAs, management consultants, burned out business executives and “retired” generals alike a new career without actually knowing anything about what they are doing. Bullshittery of the finest quality.
- jfil 5mo agoI recomment reading "The Management Myth" by Matthew Stewart, on this topic
- the_42nd 5mo agoUsing a throwaway for this comment, but my first experience with this kind of thing was in 2013 when I joined a major international company with over 100k employees worldwide and realized that there were entire departments and organizations dedicated to delivering no value at all. Departments with 100s of people, with middle managers making several times the average salary in my country, where after years of work nothing of value was delivered and nobody was held responsible. I always wondered how companies like this can even exist and why shareholders invest in them.
- RobRivera 5mo agoFollow the money, and answers become more obvious as to why. As to how? Hehehehe
- micromacrofoot 5mo agoentropy
- pixl97 5mo agoBecause in general they are still making more money than god on average. This and they spend a lot of effort in rent seeking and otherwise ensuring their profits are encoded into laws. Also, quite often those 100s of people sitting around are a political requirement. That is, they got some tax break to ensure X people have jobs. That is, it's a job program.
- eikenberry 5mo agoEveryone knows this is true of every large enterprise shop and is one of the reasons that wall street rewards layoffs.
- sosodev 5mo agoIf Wall Street was so wise they would only reward meaningful layoffs. Laying off 10% of a company by stack ranking every team accomplishes nothing. Particularly if the company just hires the same number of cut people next quarter. If a tree has a dead branch, you cut it off. Cutting off 10% of the leaves evenly distributed among branches will remove some dead leaves, but it leaves the source of the problems unaddressed.
- simianwords 5mo agoBeen noticing this new phenotype of tech bro who writes with an air of superiority, subtly belittling all those beneath him. Also ardently believes in - bullshit jobs - enshittification - kubernetes being a psyop - tech landscape was best exactly during his career peak and has gone down since
- Apocryphon 5mo agoWhat are your opinions on the first two?
- pixl97 5mo agoThe second two are typical conservative tech-bro "the past was always better" type bs. The first two are actual real effects of the complex world that we live in. Go back 150 years or so ago and most jobs were not bullshit jobs. That is, humanity spent most of its time trying to feed and clothe ourselves and if you weren't one of the few people with money then "not starving next winter" was pretty high on your list of priorities in working. With the rise of industrialization, mechination, and transportation most of our needs can be met pretty easily (if society optimizes itself for that is a totally different story). It is highly that your job at this point has anything to do with continued human survival and instead you're working on some kind of revenue generation for some company. This couples well with enshittification. It took a good part of said industrial revolution to learn how to make things of all kinds and make them reliably. But it turns out too much reliability isn't profitable over the long term. Getting your customer on an upgrade treadmill where they constantly give you more money makes you huge. You'll be able to get huge loans and buy up your reliable competition.
- slopinthebag 5mo agoYes, give or take a couple of those points. Some additional ones: - believes SWE is now fundamentally different because of AI - repeatedly belittles people who aren't on the AI hype train - believes slop bans and distaste of AI art is gatekeeping
- claysmithr 5mo agoBSOD now stands for bullshit on demand... thanks to AI
- boznz 5mo agoThose that can Do, those that can't Bullshit.
- boznz 5mo ago.. or Downvote
- pugworthy 5mo agoSpeaking of bullshittery, I don't really appreciate it's little game when it comes to trying to convince me to turn off JavaScript. It knows when you see it and you'll know when you see it.
- NooneAtAll3 5mo agoif anything, it's browser's fault for notifying page when you tab away from it
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- a_shovel 5mo agoI keep javascript on because i want websites to not be broken by default. but if they insist, i can add their domain to my ublock filter
- Ethee 5mo agoAs someone who likes to half read an article then come back to it later, this actually pissed me off. Messing with your favicon and the tab title so I can't actually find your article to finish reading it later feels hostile towards users like me. As such I blocked this URL entirely. I don't care what their motive behind it is, if you want to act sus then I don't want to be on your website.
- Noumenon72 5mo agoNot amused by it editing my tab and icon to a Google Maps search pin for "adult entertainment clubs" on my work computer. OK, maybe a little.
- NooneAtAll3 5mo agohave you ever needed a tab actually knowing that you've tabbed away? disabling JS seems too large of a change, but basic privacy of "not having your tabbing habits tracked" seems to be one addon away (and it's scary that it isn't an option of the browser)
- dataviz1000 5mo ago> I found myself in one of the rare situations in which I was mindlessly doom-scrolling on LinkedIn Yet, the biggest bullshittery, is every company that almost each of you work at requires a link to a LinkedIn account on every job application, not optional. It has become a form of social credit. LinkedIn isn't completely meaningless either. A huge portion of the posts are also propaganda. Finding a new job is tied to listening to propaganda.
- throwup9 5mo ago> requires a link to a LinkedIn account on every job application, not optional. Finding a new job is tied to listening to propaganda. Let's be clear, what this really means is that if you enjoy survival, you are forced into directly supporting the Epstein class. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-04/how-jeffrey-epstein-used-reid-hoffman-to-court-silicon-valley-s-elite https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-03-04/how-jeffr... The linked in bullshitters aren't having fun, they don't actually think any of this is real, they might even prefer real work to grifting. People in charge of hiring and interviewing don't want this. The coercion is in the network really.. but everyone must become complicit.
- Aurornis 5mo agoHaving a LinkedIn profile and doomscrolling the LinkedIn feed are two entirely separate activities. Most people create a profile and update it when they're job searching, but they don't visit LinkedIn or interact with the feed at all.
- dataviz1000 5mo agoI'm getting old. I miss the good ol' days when they would look at my resume, call the places to make sure I worked there, and invite me in to prove I know the skills that I put on my resume.
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- qwertyforce 5mo agoI blame the ML engineers who work on these recommendation systems. They chase simplistic objectives like CTR, time spent, and so on, which can be gamed by this kind of content. This creates huge positive feedback loops in which popular content becomes even more popular and forms “metas,” while models train on clickstream data they themselves have influenced. They could try to fix this, but they won’t, because no one is asking them to
- RobRivera 5mo agoVery much intertia bias that hamstrings discoverability
- tolerance 5mo agoHaven't thoroughly read this article but these passages from C. Wright Mill's The Sociological Imagination (1959) immediately come to mind: Once upon a time academic reputations were generally ex- pected to be based upon the productions of books, studies, mono- graphs—in sum, upon the production of ideas and scholarly works, and upon the judgment of these works by academic col- leagues and intelligent laymen. One reason why this has been so in social science and the humanities is that a man’s competence or incompetence has been available for inspection, since the older academic world did not contain privileged positions of compe- tence. It is rather difficult to know whether the alleged compe- tence of a corporation president, for example, is due to his own personal abilities or to the powers and facilities available to him by virtue of his position. But there has been no room for such doubt about scholars working, as old-fashioned professors have worked, as craftsmen. However, by his prestige, the new academic statesman, like the business executive and the military chieftain, has acquired means of competence which must be distinguished from his personal competence—but which in his reputation are not so distinguished. A permanent professional secretary, a clerk to run to the library, an electric typewriter, dictating equipment, and a mimeographing machine, and perhaps a small budget of three or four thousand dollars a year for purchasing books and periodicals—even such minor office equipment and staff enormously increases any scholar’s appearance of competence. Any business executive will laugh at the pettiness of such means; college professors will not —few professors, even productive ones, have such facilities on a secure basis. Yet such equipment is a means of competence and of career—which secure clique membership makes much more likely than does unattached scholarship. The clique’s prestige increases the chance to get them, and having them in turn in- creases the chance to produce a reputation.
- kmacdough 5mo agoThis formatting is intolerable on mobile.
- tolerance 5mo agoPage 108. https://ratical.org/ratville/AoS/TheSociologicalImagination.pdf https://ratical.org/ratville/AoS/TheSociologicalImagination.... https://ia801709.us.archive.org/6/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.101543/2015.101543.The-Sociological-Imagination_text.pdf https://ia801709.us.archive.org/6/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.10...
- VonTum 5mo agoI find especially painful the tradeoff between productivity and visibility. Every minute I spend trying to advertise my project is a minute I'm not spending making it better.
- Animats 5mo agoIn "Failure Is Not an Option", Gene Kranz, who ran Apollo Mission Control in the 1960s, brings up tolerance for bullshit. Someone tried to bullshit him about something. He put his arm around them and walked them out of mission control. They were never in that room again. We need more leaders like that.
- game_the0ry 5mo agoThey need to get int positions of leadership first. In a typical corpo office, those people are not rewarded, they are pushed out.
- Animats 5mo agoYes. Apollo had a lot of WWII military people. The dud leaders in the US military were mostly identified early in the war and kicked out. Gen. George C. Marshall established a "plucking board" in 1941 to remove bad officers.[1] "In the first six months of its existence the panel removed 195 captains, majors, lieutenant colonels, and colonels. Ultimately 500 colonels were forced into retirement." That set the tone for the rest of the war. Bad leaders were routinely demoted or retired by a formal process for identifying losers. Not for policy reasons. For not being good at combat leadership. For most of the 1950s, at least, the US military continued that tradition. Much of the staff of Apollo came from that environment. [1] https://www.defensemedianetwork.com/stories/gen-george-c-marshall-eliminates-dead-wood/ https://www.defensemedianetwork.com/stories/gen-george-c-mar...
- khazhoux 5mo ago> the modern economy has stopped rewarding people who know what they are doing, and started rewarding people who know how to look like they do. Yes, this is a totally new phenomenon which has never ever been the case at literally every point in human history.
- sollewitt 5mo agoIn an attention economy the thing that pays is capturing attention - a terrifyingly finite thing that determines our lived experiences. Rewarding people who are good that this is a compounding mistake.
- ToucanLoucan 5mo agoThe one good thing I hope comes from the en masse adoption for this sort of slop is that it renders the problem of the attention economy inert, because now anyone, including the platforms themselves, can now generate masses of pointless content at a whim. I hope, very very HOPE, that what that will do is that vacuous bullshit content will finally be SO abundant, so ubiquitous, that even regular people who generally don't care about the quality of things will FINALLY have to curate their feeds out of sheer necessity. I genuinely think the future of Facebook, LinkedIn, et al could look very much like just bot farms generating bullshit at scale for other bots to consume and inflate the metrics on while everyone actually interested in... anything really, sails off to greener pastures that have revenue streams that don't require this. To be clear, my ideal future would not be this, if for no other reason than the catastrophic electrical and bandwidth being wasted to pretend anyone on LinkedIn's best ranking posts understands a single thing under the sun, but I consider this a solid #2 option.
- iguessthislldo 5mo agoRight now YouTube is supposedly trying to crack down on AI-generated videos, so I think some of this is happening. I don't know how to feel about it since I keep hearing about honest niche channel getting caught up in it. Ultimately and unfortunately I think there's an equilibrium between slop vs genuine content that the platforms will tolerate or maybe even actively encourage. Youtube has GenAI tools built into it, so it's not much of a stretch for them to generate videos either if they thought they could get away with it.
- tptacek 5mo agoThis is the bullshittery in its mature form, which doesn’t consist of individual lies, or individual scams, but a steady-state ecosystem in which a large share of professional output is produced to be seen by other people producing output, and in which the connection to anything resembling a real customer, a real problem, or a real outcome has gone slack. Wait, what? Being two or more steps removed from "a real customer" makes your job bullshit?
- cjs_ac 5mo agoBecause I live in the UK, I’m often told this narrative of social decay, about how everything is getting worse and no one cares about doing anything properly. I disagree; I think it’s always been like this, and our feeling of disappointment persists because our expectation of improvement grows faster than actual improvement. LinkedIn is full of bullshit because no one has anything genuine to say that’s appropriate for that platform. The people posting that nonsense don’t actually believe it. The game is tedious, and if you don’t play you lose. It was like this before the Internet, too: my father limited his earning potential by being bad at networking, whereas my grandfather did went so far as to join the Freemasons to climb the corporate ladder to the top.
- jschveibinz 5mo agoThis. There are so many examples of this just from my childhood in the 60's in the U.S. My father was a machinist who refused to play this game--and he constantly complained about the other guys who did. There is nothing really new under the sun when it comes to human behavior.
- Aurornis 5mo ago> If you want to see the cleanest expression of this, the place to look is LinkedIn. It's funny how easily you can convince people that social media is not real life. Those influencers posting content 24/7 are a minority of people putting on a show, not a reflection of the real world. It's such an obvious feature of social media. But when the topic changes to LinkedIn they completely forget that. They act like the LinkedIn lunatics they see posting AI thought leader posts twice a day are completely average and everyone is like this, except them of course. Very few people post to the LinkedIn feed. Those who do are usually playing a game of some sort. If you go to the LinkedIn feed and draw conclusions, know that you're drawing conclusions about a vocal minority of wannabe business influencers. These people exist, but LinkedIn is a circus sideshow to the world of business. Not the main attraction.
- nickff 5mo agoYou're describing a sort of Gell-Mann Amnesia: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_effect https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_Amnesia_effect
- sublinear 5mo agoI increasingly feel the same about the comment quality of HN in recent years. There are three topics that inevitably get injected into every discussion: AI, politics, and nostalgia. The thing is, I don't understand the goal. This isn't reddit. Few people on here are that broke, uneducated, or impressionable. This site is also deliberately designed to not reward any interaction.
- mnemotronic 5mo agoWell, foo. My comment about President Facade torpedoed before it set sail.
- nickff 5mo agoHN has definitely experienced a marked decline in quality over the last 15 years, (since the account I am currently posting from has existed,) I know this sort of remark is discouraged by the guidelines, but the trend is substantial enough that it cannot be ignored. I don't think users have any specific goal, but they are indeed posting the same inane drivel and joke comments as Reddit, notably including the classic (and idiotic) 'I mis-read/misunderstood the submission title X as Y hahah'.
- wotsdat 5mo ago[dead]
- jph00 5mo agoTIL HN still doesn't support rfc3492, 23 years after it was published, and so this domain is not rendered correctly on the site. :( (It should appear as: マリウス.com )
- zozbot234 5mo ago[dead]
- Analemma_ 5mo agoNowhere does RFC 3492 say that browsers MUST render IDNs in the original language, so I think saying "HN does not support" this RFC is false, or at least disputable. Personally I strongly prefer having it in untranslated Punycode to avoid scams; IMO everyone should browse the web with Punycode disabled.
- Havoc 5mo ago>started rewarding people who know how to look like they do [know what they are doing]. These days I'm wondering whether even that matters anymore. Fastest way to get rich these days seems to be insider trading, scams, onlyfans, leveraging addictions etc.
- Lerc 5mo agoI think the converse of this is also true. People who do something good are derided for being unprofessional for not adhering to some cosmetic standard. You can hardly blame people who make fancy websites for projects which look cool but you can't tell what it is they have to offer. If the alternative is a plain simple 'here it is, it does this' followed by a pile-on of armchair critics who have already decided on the quality of your project because your page lacks razzmatazz.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- Nathanba 5mo agoI think bullshittery is generally underestimated as a threat and not new at all. There are entire global organizations like Scientology who are founded on bullshitting. Entire product lines, food categories and industries made for no benefit to you except the thinnest layer of taste to bullshit your senses into accepting the trash into your body or life. Bullshitting just like lying isn't merely something a few percent of bad people do, the majority of individuals seems to do it every single day. It's pervasive in all of society, it's on every level, up from the lowest to the highest levels of political office.
- iguessthislldo 5mo agoAbsolutely, it's been part of humanity since well before before Ea-nasir was dealing his copper. Maybe I'm being too optimistic of human nature, but I'd like to think most of the time we don't do it concisely. I think a lot of it is earnest things we've convinced ourselves of. Now we have a have a massive industry dedicated to programs that are amazing from certain perspectives but can bullshit at a unprecedented scale. Does GenAI really change things? Maybe not fundamentally but it certainly makes it a lot easier to bullshit even if people don't mean to. The well meaning people with bad ideas are still gonna have those. Maybe an LLM will convince them it's bad (or more likely play along), but the not so well meaning people now have new tools that they can explicitly use to extend their abilities.
- cryo32 5mo agoSeen this a few months back. One of our "analysts" threw together a bunch of nonsensical shit and tried to pitch it as a product change to our management team. It was a powerpoint full of charts that made no sense populated by data that made no sense. After I bit I realised the text was so "normal" it was LLM generated. The guy had just made a pitch deck with an LLM after throwing some random numbers at it. Our management team bought the idea right up. I didn't say anything despite having professional qualifications in mathematics and statistics. 5 years ago I might have done. Now I know it's futile. Last time I tried to stand up for integrity over bullshit I got the full management language tirade thrown back at me for daring to question it. I realised after a bit that it's a fragile house of cards and if you push it the entire thing will go and they are doing everything they can to keep it standing. This was so soul-crushing that I decided I was just going to fuck around and get paid until I get fired. See how long I can stretch it out. By doing that I'm doing less damage than they are.
- DanielHB 5mo agoI think a lot of this sentiment comes from the human size of modern institutions and corporations. A lot of us have lived through that small fraction of time where software engineering was done in small isolated groups working on top of small foundations. These days it is much harder for small groups of excellent people to achieve a lot more than their mediocre peers in already established fields. Fact is large institutions inevitably lead to these kind of inefficiencies, we just moved on to larger projects and companies. If anything this phenomena is better explained by reduction in productivity growth than social media, in a realm of low productivity growth there is a tendency for consolidation which leads to larger companies and thus more BS. Governments and institutions also have grown a lot more BS but I believe it is mostly tied to high population growth in the previous 100 years than low productivity growth. After all governments don't consolidate like companies do (war vs mergers/acquisitions/bankrupcies). It is a common trope of history how big institution grows so big they crumble under their own weight of inefficiencies. All the way back to the roman empire and probably countless more examples even earlier.
- mariopt 5mo agoGreat article
- smitty1e 5mo agoThis is among the valid complaints that can be leveled at public most public figures. While I understand the need to be flexible, and Sun Tzu certainly preached deception as a weapon, ambiguity sucks in politics. Not a partisan point. The new thing seems to be "say whatever is needful" during the campaign, and then just run amok when sworn in. It's swell if you agree, and hell if you don't, with the decisions. No matter how pro-state you are the US National debt, Uncle Sam's prostate, cannot enlarge forever. Possibly some sobriety will be forced upon us.
- m3galinux 5mo agoSaw the word Bullshittery. Thought someone might have written a piece on SovietWomble[1]. Actual article ended up being about economics and business, and defeatist at that. Was disappointed. 1: https://www.youtube.com/user/SovietWomble https://www.youtube.com/user/SovietWomble
- negura 5mo agothis genre of content seems to trend often. i guess it's satisfying to list and neatly organize all the details of a problem. but it doesn't try to explain what lead to this. in the case of pointless jobs they need to be financed in the first place. so the monetary policy of central banks has obviously played a big role